House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not mind being interrupted, but what is the point?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The Deputy Leader of the House knows that that is not the case. The leader of the Opposition can make nominations when the Prime Minister graciously allows her to do so. It is entirely up to the Prime Minister when and how many.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Correct, and you have just had six; you could have nominated hereditary Peers as life Peers. There was nothing stopping you—nothing. The important point is that we have had opportunities to deal with this issue over the last 25 years and have not done so. As a consequence, Labour put in its manifesto a clear commitment to deal with the hereditary principle once and for all, which is what we have before us in this very short, simple Bill.

Let me just address this point. The Prime Minister also invites the House of Lords Appointments Commission to make nominations to the Cross Benches. In deciding the number of these nominations, the Prime Minister considers a range of factors, of course, including the political balance of the House. Certainly, retirements and other departures mean that new Peers will always be needed to ensure the House has appropriate expertise and, as has been said before, there is no reason why hereditary Peers cannot be nominated in future lists. Political parties have the opportunity to do that. My noble friend the Leader has recognised the special position of Cross-Benchers and committed to discuss it with the relevant parties. That is the commitment she has made.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, is concerned with the party balance of the House, I remind your Lordships that even if this Bill is passed the Government Benches will make up 28% of this Chamber, compared to 31% for the party opposite. As my noble friend the Leader has said before to your Lordships, this House functions best when there are roughly equal numbers between the two main parties; I stand by that. As I have said to the noble Baroness, there are many occasions when we operate on a cross-party basis. I do not see that this Bill will change that one bit—far from it. It will bring about a more sensible balance in this House.

With respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, this amendment is unnecessary. It is not appropriate for this Bill and I respectfully request that she withdraws it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I disagree with all these amendments because I believe they are based on a misconception that the change we are discussing is a fundamental change. It is not; it is a tidying-up measure. It does not affect the powers of the Lords or our relationship with the Commons, far less our relationship with the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. The amendments which say we need to institute a new process to evaluate the impact on all these broader things is totally pointless, because it will have virtually zero influence on all those things.

There are two areas of further change which we have spent lots of time debating which have nothing to do directly with the Bill. One has to do with how the current House of Lords improves the way it operates, whether that is by having a retirement age, participation levels or all the other things that we have spent a lot of time discussing that the Government have in their manifesto. We can possibly discuss how to achieve it in the next group.

The second question, which is certainly beyond the purview of this Bill, has to do with whether you have long-term democratic reform. Clearly, from these Benches we think we should. Clearly, the House of Commons in the coalition Government thought by a massive majority that we should. That is not a revolutionary change which has not been discussed and where MPs have not thought about the issues which concern the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, so much. They were discussed and a conclusion was reached—but whether the Bill proceeded had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the principle behind it.

So these amendments would get us nowhere. As for a constitutional conference, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has said, in the past they have reached no conclusion, because you do not reach a total consensus on this. If anybody thinks that, frankly, they have not been listening at all, and anybody who hears the words “constitutional royal commission” thinks “years of delay”—and whatever we need, we do not need that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I must disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby. If there is a misconception here, it is about the continuing presence of our hereditary colleagues in your Lordships’ House. They were not kept here by some form of transition, as the Deputy Leader of the House put it in an earlier debate; they were kept here because, in the debates at the end of the last century, nobody could answer the fundamentally important question of what this House is for, how it ought to be constituted and whether there was a better route to come here than the route by which we have all come, in our different ways. We were kept here as surety to ensure that the reform process that the then Labour Government embarked on would continue. They had a further decade in power after 1999 and brought forward no further measures, which is why so many of us on this side are sceptical about the speed with which they will bring forward the further reforms that they proposed in their most recent manifesto. So this is a very important group of amendments because, as Amendment 95 puts it, it is about the impact of this Bill on the effectiveness of the House of Lords.

The Government, like the noble Lord, Lord Newby, have cast this Bill very narrowly and argued that this is a tightly focused Bill. In some ways it is too narrowly cast and too tightly focused. It ducks the questions of what this House is for and the questions that flow from it about how it should best be composed. But, although narrow, the Bill will have serious and sweeping impacts on this House of Parliament. As my noble friends Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Swire put it, this Bill puts the cart before the horse. It avoids those questions and seeks to enact a very important change based on a misunderstanding of the position from the late 1990s.

Throughout this Committee, we have heard concerns raised from all corners of your Lordships’ House that this Bill will leave us a less effective legislative Chamber. Ministers have disagreed with the concerns that have been raised. Well, here is their chance to prove it. If those of us who have expressed our concerns are wrong, these reviews will be the opportunity to prove us wrong.

I believe that the fears we have heard in this Committee are well-founded. Our hereditary colleagues attend your Lordships’ House more frequently than life Peers. They play a more active role, not just in the Division Lobbies and in the Chamber but in our committees, on the Woolsack and in convening the Cross Benches. As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin put it in our debate on the first group, armed with the data that the Library has provided him, our hereditary colleagues play a valuable and active role in the functioning of your Lordships’ House. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said in that debate, “Why are we thinking of removing those who work the hardest while leaving those who do not?”

I am sure the Deputy Leader will say that all these questions about participation and activity can be addressed later. Again, these amendments are an opportunity for him to do that. At no point in this Committee have we had any commitment from the Government about when they plan to turn to the next parts of the reforms that they proposed in their manifesto. Ministers have not even committed to do so by the end of this Parliament. So I share the concerns that my noble friend Lord Hailsham has raised: that we will be waiting another decade or longer to see the further reforms that noble Lords have called for throughout the course of these debates.

My noble friends’ amendments in these groups would give us the opportunity to review progress after 12 months, on the timetable proposed by my noble friend Lord Dundee, or two years, in the timeframe proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. It would also be an opportunity for us to review what we have lost. We have heard in the course of these debates how our hereditary colleagues bring valuable experience from their work in business and agriculture, two areas where on the Government’s record it is clear that they have something of a blind spot, and it is important to have those voices raised in this scrutinising House of Parliament.

I am sure the Deputy Leader will seek to persuade us that, once again, our fears are misplaced and that these amendments are unnecessary, but I urge him to look seriously at these amendments, which call for modest but important reviews. The Government listened to the concerns that were raised in your Lordships’ House in our debate on the Football Governance Bill and gave us a statutory review of that new regulator after five years. I know football is something that attracts a lot more attention than reform of the House of Lords, but I think the constitution of our second legislative Chamber is about as important as the beautiful game. I hope the Deputy Leader will look at this and consider giving us a review in this Bill as well.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not think the Arsenal kick-off is quite yet; I have another half an hour or so.

I am not going to repeat all the arguments from the first group. We had an extensive debate about that, so I am not going to go through it. But, in relation to the challenge that the noble Lord has just made, we have had a transition for over 25 years. As the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, there were attempts to make fundamental changes, but they all hit the fundamental problem of “Don’t do anything until you do everything”. That is the problem here, and it is not going to be resolved by royal commissions and other bodies. I have seen those royal commissions, and they tend to mean long grass and do not build consensus.

The amendments in this group relate to types of formal review. In some cases, they would make commencement of the substantive provisions in the Bill conditional on such a review. I note that the Committee has discussed similar amendments in previous groups. Given that, I hope noble Lords will forgive me for repeating the words of my noble friend the Attorney-General: these amendments are unnecessary and disproportionate.

Amendments 95, 96, 98, 99 and 102 are concerned with the imposition of a duty to review the impact of the Bill following implementation. I stress again that the impact of the Bill is straightforward—no one can see it as complicated—and post-legislative scrutiny would likely not yield any more meaningful conclusions.

Amendment 95, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require the Secretary of State, within two years of this Act being passed and annually thereafter, to publish

“a report on the impact of this Act on the effectiveness of the House of Lords”

at discharging its functions. As my noble friend the Attorney-General pointed out last week on a similar amendment to this, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, placing a duty on the Government to undertake reviews until the end of time feels disproportionate in these circumstances. There is also an implication that our hereditary colleagues are intrinsically better able than life Peers to help the House to carry out its functions. As I said on a previous Committee day, who are we judging here? Are we judging life Peers as being inferior, not able or not committed?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is empirical. The data show that our hereditary colleagues currently come here more often and participate more. That is not a slight on those of us who are here as life Peers, but does the Deputy Leader not accept that the data show the valuable contribution that they make to the work of this House?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not think the data show what the noble Lord is suggesting. It is a marginal change—1% or 2%. The simple fact is that, when you start implying that some noble Lords are better than others, I am afraid you are implying that life Peers somehow make less of a contribution. They do not, and that does not help us in terms of what we are trying to achieve here. The idea that our hereditary colleagues are intrinsically better does not help the House to carry out its functions. It does a disservice to the contribution made by life Peers on all sides of the Chamber, particularly our Cross-Bench Peers.

It is important to point out that there was no legislative scrutiny following the passage of the 1999 Act, despite that legislation removing a significantly higher number of Members from your Lordships’ House. This was because it was not necessary. The House continued—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The reason why a certain number of hereditary Peers were kept here in your Lordships’ House was to perform that post-legislative scrutiny. Again, the Deputy Leader has suggested that this is the ending of a transitional phase, removing those who were kept here to try to keep the last Labour Government on their toes about reform. If this is the end of a transition, can the Deputy Leader tell us what we are transitioning to?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

As I said, the Leader of the House and others have acknowledged that what we did in 1999 was remove the hereditary principle. As my noble friend Lord Grocott has said on a number of occasions, that was not simply a mechanism to ensure transition; it was about saying to the Labour Government, “You won’t get your business through if you don’t keep these hereditaries here”. That was the reality, as my noble friend made clear in previous debates.

We have had over 25 years since the removal of the hereditary principle while maintaining 92. The Opposition had the opportunity on many occasions to support my noble friend so that those hereditary Peers could have stayed, but no: we ended up electing further hereditary Peers who were much younger and had no record of experience—as the noble Lord suggested—prior to their election by a very small number of people. The reality is that we are trying to defend the indefensible. We have a clear commitment in our manifesto.

By the way, there was no legislative scrutiny—I will come on to other commitments in our manifesto—but it is disingenuous of noble Lords to say that somehow they do not believe what we are saying. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I assure noble Lords that we will commit to that.

Amendment 96 from the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, would place a duty on the Government within 12 months of the Bill coming into force to produce a report dealing with its effects, including on devolved Governments, the Commonwealth, members of the Council of Europe and the rest of the world. As I have said, the impact of the Bill is very clear and I submit that, contrary to our propensity to talk about ourselves, the implications of the Bill are unlikely to be felt substantively throughout the international community.

I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham—I have said this many times before—that the Government are committed to reforming the House of Lords, as set out in our manifesto. As my noble friend the Leader of the House has said in previous debates, the Government are keen to engage on how best to implement the other manifesto commitments by building consensus and understanding the needs of this House. She will come forward with proposals for doing this in a structured way.

Noble Lords are also aware of our longer-term commitment to consult the public on an alternative second Chamber. In light of this comment, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.